It’s never how you wanted it
If there’s one lesson life insists on reminding me of, it’s this: You can get what you want, but it will never be how you wanted it.
motivation
78 posts
You can’t bargain over the price
When business owners seek out a new marketing plan, it’s rarely because the last plan didn’t work. It’s because, for one reason or another, the last plan wasn’t worked.
How to cause the effects of marketing
I’ve written before about my love of bad horror movies. In so many cases, it’s clear that the director didn’t want to make a movie. They wanted to have made a movie. And there’s a huge difference between those two desires.
Why you should celebrate every day
Have you ever been stuck in the “arrival fallacy”? That’s the idea that happiness and satisfaction are one big accomplishment away.
Are you DEWing it?
Your marketing needs a “do not pass go” strategy. You need an order of operations to know what to check, and in what order, to make sure you’re doing the right things.
Marketing never fails.
Marketing never fails. It just stops. It stops because we ran out of money, enthusiasm, or patience.
“Stop the willpower madness”
Marketing efforts don’t fail. They stop. Like New Year’s Resolutions, our marketing efforts simply peter out and fade away over time.
How I’ll get what I want this year
I used to think the secret to getting what I wanted was to have an ambitious goal, to state it publicly, and to exert as much effort as I could in that direction, as fast as I could. But I was wrong. That doesn’t actually work.
The future isn’t real
When we think about “the future” of our business or our marketing, we’re not considering real events. We’re imagining what might happen. No matter how skilled we may be at marketing, our vision of the future is quite literally a figment of our imagination.
Joy
There’s a tendency for consultants, especially new ones, to take themselves pretty seriously. I certainly did. Knowing, as Benjamin Franklin once said, that “grave men are taken ... as wise men,” I fell into the trap of trying to be overly serious in my conversations, marketing, and day-to-day work.
Pick something you actually believe in
Business owners usually want to know how to judge their market position before they make public moves to reinforce it. Beyond confirming it is within your current capabilities and that it has a credible opposite, how can you tell if you’ve come up with a good position?
Never a settled product
Our immediate measure of the quality of our marketing is whether we are enjoying the process or not. We need to enjoy it, which means we need to feel confident in what we’re doing, embrace joy and celebrate our achievements, and set a measured, sustainable pace.
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